Theatre: CDS of the week: The Spoils three new releases
Trafalgar Studios, London SW1 (0844-871 7632). Until 13 August
American screen stars don’t often seem to make good playwrights, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Plays written by Matthew Perry (Chandler in Friends) and Zach Braff (the film director and Scrubs actor) have recently been staged in the West End, and both proved to be embarrassing flops. But Jesse Eisenberg (who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) is the exception. He, it turns out, is a serious talent. The Spoils, a success off-broadway last year, marks his London theatrical debut, and “while not perfect, it’s a genuinely funny and intelligent study of the corrosive penalties of American privilege and sense of entitlement”. It also boasts a cracking lead performance from the actor-playwright as one of the “nervily awkward, intense millennials” he specialises in on film.
Eisenberg plays Ben, a wealthy Jewish twentysomething, kicked out of NYU and living in a Manhattan apartment bought for him by his father. A wannabe film-maker, he “mostly kicks around at home, smoking pot and self-destructing, paralysed by the weight of his own expectations”, said Matt Trueman on Whatsonstage. com. “Privilege has given him every opportunity and, as such, average won’t cut it. He has to be exceptional.” And for this “modern-day Misanthrope”, exceptional means cutting everyone else down to size, including his Nepalese housemate Kalyan
Running time: 2hrs 30mins ★★★
( The Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar) and old schoolmate Ted, a nice-but-dim Wall Streeter. Eisenberg plays Ben “as a man out of joint with himself, crunched around the furniture as if even the standard sitting position is beneath him”.
It all adds up to the most compelling “slice of American neurotica I’ve seen in a long while”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Eisenberg is clearly something of a “renaissance man in the Woody Allen mould”, and this, his third stage play, is both arresting and funny. Scott Elliot’s production “takes a while to heat up” and “loses some of the gags in the rattling delivery”. But it has a “genuine must-see star performance at its centre”, and is “light, but with satisfyingly sharp edges”. A hoot – and, I expect, a hit.
No one could mistake Versailles, the French costume romp being aired on BBC2, for Downton Abbey, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. It cost twice as much to make (£21m) and it isn’t exactly coy about sex. “In the first 20 minutes alone we were treated to a naked King Louis XIV being smeared with lemon juice and straddled by a topless ingenue, a pair of bewigged toffs engaged in oral sex, and a courtesan in a see-through blouse striding from a lake.” The whole thing has the feel of “a pervy Ikea ad”.
But if all this was designed to attract more viewers it doesn’t seem to have worked, said The Sun. Each time one of the seven sex scenes in the first episode was shown, more and more people switched off. Some 2.4 million tuned in at the start; there were only 1.2 million by the end.
That negative response may have had something to do with the weak dialogue and characterisation, said Sam Wollaston in The Guardian. “Wolf Hall this isn’t.” No doubt aware of all this, the BBC has been trying its best to present it as “serious history rather than just a series of pretexts for sex scenes”, said Media Monkey in The Guardian. Alongside the drama, it has recruited no fewer than four historians to talk about the period. Yet it seems to be making just as much effort, said the Daily Mail, to get scenes from the drama removed from pornography site Pornhub.